Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Artist Who Shocked NYC

The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a person given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester picketed the work each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.